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Bony 🦴 Skeletino 💀 @notalegalrecord.net · 08/12/2024

From @kwistent.bsky.social ‘s forthcoming THE SUN WON’T COME OUT TOMORROW, a history of orphanhood in the USA. Adopted people will want to read this book for the way Martin’s analysis connects with the abolitionist emphasis on #adoption as a privatized solution to systemic social harms.

From our first introduction to her, then, Annie's main problem is the hold that mean old Miss Asthma has over her due to her parentless, impoverished state. The solution to her problem is adoption by "nice folks" —people who make the individual decision to share their wealth and love by rescuing a "charity girl" like her. In order to win over those folks, Annie needs to show hope and determination, to be resilient above all. This portrayal of Annie's problem and solution remains constant throughout the many iterations of her story and has twisted our imagined reality of orphanhood for gen-erations. Each time we regurgitate Annie's story, we allow ourselves to believe the orphan's struggle is one with individual causes and individual answers. In doing so, we overlook the systems-economic, religious, political— that have made orphans out of real children like Annie and that continue to control their fates. Our preference to buy into Annie's version of orphanhood at the expense of sitting with actuality speaks to how we as Americans value individualism and fail to grasp the need for societal interventions for systemic harms.

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